Broking firm Angel One, aims to become the most trusted fintech brand, impacting a billion lives. To realise this vision, the company chose to sponsor the Indian Premier League (IPL).
In an interview on Media Dialogues With Storyboard18, Prabhakar Tiwari, Chief Growth Officer of Angel One, emphasised that the IPL sponsorship offered a unique opportunity to enhance Angel One’s reputation and advance its market leadership ambitions.
Discussing the impact of their IPL sponsorship, Tiwari highlighted a significant surge in web traffic and app installations, signalling a strong positive response from consumers.
He stressed the importance of visibility and brand recall in a competitive market landscape, citing research that positioned Angel One among the top three most recalled brands during the IPL season.
Amin Lakhani, CEO of MindShare South Asia, praised Angel One’s strategic approach to their IPL debut, attributing their success not to luck but to years of meticulous planning and effective market positioning.
Below are the excerpts of the discussion.
Q: Prabhakar, IPL is done, Angel One was a first-time sponsor on this massive tournament and media vehicle. Going into it what were your objectives for this IPL? And has it met your expectations?
Tiwari: For us, it’s very important to have the leadership perception because that’s the category in which we operate for the longest time and we have really scaled well in the last two or three years. However, at times if you’re not really present on big platforms, in the kind of top funnel then it’s not really possible for you to kind of pass on that message of category leadership that was critical for us. Also, our category penetration is like 4% or so which is very small and we have the ambition to kind of take it to the next level. So we were thinking about what are the right vehicles. In past our brand spending was kind of modest, but it really worked for us. Our marketing metrics have moved, the brand has seen almost 2x jump, and on other parameters, which are organic business, we have seen a big jump.
Then it was important for us to really look for that vehicle which can take our brand story forward, and give us the kind of stature we want in the category we operate in. Also, we want to make multiple fintech experiences available in a single super-app format. And for that, it’s very important that a super app needs a super brand. And what else can make Angel One a super brand than the biggest marketing and media platform IPL? So these were the initial objectives we had when we kind of chose IPL.
Q: But did it meet those objectives in terms of all the results? Give me some of the focused results for you from this IPL. What were you looking at, and how did it deliver on those metrics?
Tiwari: So when we look at these things, we look at full funnel things. But in terms of important top funnel things like web traffic, and installation, we had a significant jump from 14% to 18% kind of numbers. We have seen a good healthy jump in lead-to-install percentage. And I’m saying all of that from an incrementality point of view because if you look at the category, it is governed by multiple factors. Not all factors may be favourable during a period. So it’s important that you take a larger span and look at how some of these metrics have moved. More importantly, if it’s about being a visible and most recalled brand, I’m very happy to share that a recent research kind of study has shown that Angel One has been consistently in the top three brands, the most recalled and most visible brand in the IPL.
Q: How much of it was beginner’s luck, do you think, for Angel One? In this IPL what we also saw was, and we’ve seen this now for the past two years, the disappearance of all the big edtech brands and the emergence of all the big fintech brands. So from your overarching media planner hat, tell me how that has played out as well.
Lakhani: What you are seeing is just one act of the IPL participation. What I am seeing is two, or three years of hard work that has gone through in building and coming up here, and now taking it to the next level. So I think that’s the story for me. So if you ask me, wearing a planner’s hat, then it’s much more hard work, and I hope that luck continues to also favour us.
Read More: Angel One’s Prabhakar Tiwari on winning the IPL ad game